DIW Roundup

Bildung und Lebenserwartung: Empirische Befunde für Deutschland und Europa

Zahlreiche Studien belegen: Die Bildung einer Person hängt stark mit gesundheitsrelevanten Lebensweisen und der allgemeinen Gesundheit zusammen. Aber bedeutet dies auch, dass Personen mit höherer Bildung auch länger leben, und kann mehr Bildung ursächlich zu einem längeren Leben führen? Dieses DIW Roundup stellt den aktuellen Forschungsstand zum Zusammenhang zwischen Bildung und Lebenserwartung dar, ...

Innovative Business Models for Cleantechs

Environmental Regulations: Lessons from the Command-and-Control Approach

Policy makers have long favored command-and-control (CAC) methods to tackle environmental damage. The number of CAC policies devoted to environmental protection has increased steadily since the 1950s and have been a large part of the overall portfolio of environmental laws andregulation in the industrialized world. Schmitt and Schulze (2011) document that between 1970 and 2011 the two most prevalent ...

Linking Cap-and-Trade Systems

Linking cap-and-trade systems promises gains in cost effectiveness and signals a strong commitment to carbon policy. Linking is also seen as one possible way of converging from regional climate policy initiatives toward a global climate policy architecture. Two linked systems have been established recently, one in Europe and one in North America. However, linking also comes with challenges, such as ...

Regulatory Differences and International Financial Integration

The Capital Markets Union (CMU) – an initiative of the European Commission – aims to unify and deepen capital markets across EU Member States by removing existing barriers to cross-border investment and, in particular, harmonizing financial and business regulations. However, harmonizing institutional frameworks across the EU Member States that historically have different legal traditions is difficult ...

The Macroeconomic Effects of Exchange Rate Movements

The macroeconomic effects of exchange rate movements have been subject to an extensive debate in international economics. Traditionally, much of the discussion was focused on the relation between the effective exchange rate and the trade balance. However, the process of financial globalization has led to a sharp increase in foreign asset and liability positions across countries and also to a greater ...

What Determines the Costs of Fiscal Consolidations?

Recent studies have proposed several factors that determine how fiscal consolidations affect the economy. This Roundup focuses on several of these determinants. Namely, it discusses how the composition of the consolidation measure, the state of the business cycle, the level of private indebtedness and the amount of fiscal stress during which the measure is implemented influences the consequences of ...

Monetary Policy Normalization in the Euro Area

The ECB announced in October 2018 that it would begin to cut back the amount of monthly asset purchases starting January 2018 while extending the duration of the purchases until at least September 2018. At it latest Governor’s Council meeting in January 2019 it decided to remain on this track despite a sharp appreciation of the euro in the meanwhile. These steps were just two on a longer and potentially ...

Wie beeinflussen Wehrdienstregelungen die Arbeitsmarkt- und Bildungsentscheidungen der Betroffenen? Ökonomische Evidenz zu einem nach wie vor wichtigen Thema

Weltweit wird die Wehrpflicht in etwa 60 Ländern praktiziert. Die Dauer des Wehrdienstes, definiert als die Ausübung eines gesetzlich verpflichtenden Dienstes in den Streitkräften eines Staates, variiert je nach Land. und beträgt in den meisten europäischen Ländern weniger als ein Jahr. In Ländern mit angespannter Sicherheitslage kann der Wehrdienst jedoch deutlich länger dauern, wie z.B. in Südkorea ...

International Investments and Current Account Imbalances: The Importance of Valuation Changes

Global capital flows have strongly increased from the 1980s until the outbreak of the financial crisis. As a result of this development, Germany's foreign investment has risen to around 250 percent of gross domestic product while foreign investments in Germany have increased to about 200 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product. This positive difference between Germany’s assets and liabilities is ...

Internationale Investitionen und Leistungsbilanzungleichgewichte: Die Bedeutung von Wertschwankungen

Finanzkrise stark gestiegen. Im Zuge dessen sind etwa die Auslandsinvestitionen Deutschlands auf rund 250 Prozent in Relation zum Bruttoinlandsprodukt, die Investitionen des Auslands in Deutschland auf etwa 200 Prozent gestiegen. Diese positive Differenz ist eine Folge der kontinuierlichen Leistungsbilanzüberschüsse Deutschlands, welche die Nettofinanzflüsse abbilden – also die Differenz zwischen Ab- ...

Capital Market Integration and Macroeconomic Stability

After the establishment of the Banking Union, the European Commission is working on measures to foster capital market deepening in Europe. Key goals for a European Capital Markets Union are to provide firms with alternative funding sources to bank credit and to make economies more resilient to local shocks through better international risk sharing. While open capital markets can improve portfolio diversification, ...

The Use of Financial Market Variables in Forecasting

Financial market indicators can provide valuable information for forecasting macroeconomic developments. In response to the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, the role of financial variables for forecasting has been revisited, and new empirical and theoretical forecasting methods able to explicitly incorporate financial market information have been developed. This roundup discusses characteristics ...

Microenterprises in Developing Countries: Is there Growth Potential?

Microenterprises account for a large fraction of employment in developing countries and they are likely to increase in importance in the future. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, around 8 million additional jobs need to be created annually in order to cope with the increasing number of new entrants into the labour market (The World Bank, 2013). As microenterprises typically only provide subsistence ...

Does More Education Protect against Mental Health Problems?

Mental health conditions are a leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and health costs worldwide: They account for 199 million DALYs or 37 percent of healthy life years lost from non-communicable diseases. The sum of direct and indirect costs worldwide were estimated to amount to 2.5 trillion US dollars in 2010 and projected to increase to 6 trillion US dollars in 2030 (Bloom et al., ...

Effizienzanalysen frühkindlicher Bildungs- und Betreuungsangebote: Mehr differenzierte Analysen für Deutschland erforderlich

Vor dem Hintergrund knapper öffentlicher Ressourcen bilden Effizienzanalysen ein zentrales Instrument im Prozess der politischen Entscheidungsfindung. Durch die Gegenüberstellung von Kosten und Nutzen können sie die Frage beantworten, ob und in welche frühkindlichen Bildungs- und Betreuungsangebote investiert werden sollte. Dieser Roundup zeigt methodische Herausforderungen auf und gibt einen Überblick ...

Wind Power: Mitigated and Imposed External Costs and Other Indirect Economic Effects

Since the 1990s, (onshore) wind power has become an important technology for electricity generation throughout the world. The economic rationale is the mitigation of negative externalities of conventional technologies, in particular emissions from fossil fuel combustion. However, wind power itself is not free of externalities. Wind turbines are alleged visual and noise impacts as well as threats to ...

The Natural Rate of Interest and Secular Stagnation

In many advanced economies, there has been a declining trend in interest rates over the past thirty years. Since the financial crisis, interest rates have remained particularly low. Though a decrease in inflation explains part of the fall in nominal interest rates, there is also a clear downtrend in real interest rates. Against this backdrop, a debate has emerged over the factors that might have contributed ...

The Natural Rate of Interest II: Empirical Overview

The concept of the natural rate of interest (NRI) dates back to Wicksell (1898) and has since then been highly debated in the economic literature. In practice, estimates of the NRI can be employed as a versatile tool for macroeconomic analysis and are a core element within the popular neo-Wicksellian (or New-Keynesian) framework. The real rate gap, i.e. the difference between the actual interest rate ...

The Natural Rate of Interest I: Theory

The term natural (or neutral) real interest rate refers to the equilibrium value of the real interest rate. As this equilibrium is usually conceived as a situation where inflationary or deflationary pressures have abated, the natural real interest rate is a key concept for central banks seeking to stabilize the general price level or targeting the rate of inflation. The present roundup provides a brief ...